The Alchemists of Loom (Loom Saga #1)(95)
“Among other things.” He may have been ready to bare his soul to her, but Arianna wasn’t there yet. They were still too much of nothing and not enough of everything for her to expose herself emotionally.
“So you patched things up with her?” he asked.
“I’m on the way to doing so.” Arianna was pointedly ambiguous, and he fell down the rabbit hole of drawing his own conclusions. The Dragon no doubt presumed she’d spoken to Florence about her plans. But Arianna would face Florence again when she could be the woman the girl had seen in her all along. She would apologize with her actions before her words.
“I’m glad.” The Dragon genuinely sounded it. Sincerity, from a Dragon. The idea was far-fetched in her mind, but Cvareh continued to make a strong case. “I’ll speak to my sister, and figure out a way back to Nova for both of us.”
Arianna shook her head. “We should go now. The more time you take, the more opportunity I have to back out of this.”
“But we have no way of breaking through the Gods’ Line…”
“The what?”
“The clouds,” he corrected hastily.
“Yes we do,” she declared triumphantly. “You didn’t think the Alchemists would let a Rider’s glider sit in the forest to be picked apart or rusted to dust, did you?”
“Leona’s glider is here?” He’d heard nothing of it.
“I found it when I was nipping through storerooms for parts.” She stood.
“The nipping around bit I believe. The rest seems suspect.”
Arianna grinned and extended her hand to the Dragon. “I like this newfound sass of yours, Cvareh. Don’t give up on it.”
“As you ask.” He took her right hand with his left. It was awkward, but it suited them. She went right, he went left: two halves of the same whole.
42. Florence
Florence raked her hands through her hair, teasing out the tangles from sleeping. It was nice to finally have a certain level of cleanliness back in her routine. Her hair had been so knotted upon arriving to the Guild that she’d been afraid she’d have to cut it. Luckily, she saved her dark locks with about an hour of careful brushing.
Her morning routine still took some getting used to. All the clothes were in their proper place. There wasn’t a Rivet tearing through closets and coming in at all hours from odd jobs, leaving her soiled clothing lying about. Her room was neat and orderly, as she preferred it and as it had been her whole life before Arianna.
But now it seemed sterile.
She hadn’t found the courage to talk to her teacher. Former teacher? Teacher. Since the day of her transition. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but that she had no idea how.
Arianna wanted Florence to go back to her and apologize. She wanted the girl she’d known in Dortam. But Florence had changed, and she wasn’t going to hold herself back for the sake of someone who claimed to want what was best for her but couldn’t live up to those words in practice.
Ari was being the fool, Florence was being stubborn, and she wondered how much longer they could both go before something broke. She just desperately hoped that all that gave was the silence, and not her morals, or Arianna’s love for her. She pulled on some of her borrowed clothing and started the day.
The connections Florence had gained in Mercury Town and the convenient knowledge of two transporters in Ter.4’s Underground was proving more useful than she ever imagined for helping the resource-starved Alchemists. She’d spent most of her days with Derek, working on how to get them more ammunition so they could actually make a stockpile, rather than just using it regularly to fight off endwig.
In the hours she wasn’t there, she was helping the armorers see how they could stretch their supplies further. Sometimes, she ran into something that made her wish she was still on speaking terms with Ari—or something that made her wish for the Revo teachers she’d had in Dortam. But Florence was determined to power through it on her own, even if it meant some late nights of trial and error with her newfound magic.
“Good morning,” she greeted Derek. He occupied one corner of a laboratory he split with a girl named Nora. She was a late riser due to her midnight bursts of inspiration, and they usually had the desk to themselves.
He stared at her skeptically.
“What?” Florence wondered if she had only thought she brushed her hair and it was still a tangled mess.
“Did you know?”
“Know what?”
“You know what,” he pressured.
“Actually… I don’t.” She hadn’t the foggiest what had gotten him so twisted in knots.
“You really don’t know?” Derek eased off, sitting across from her.
“I don’t know what I don’t know?” Florence thought about the self-posed question and struggled to see if she’d said it right. “What am I to know?”
“Your friends stole the Rider’s glider we pulled from the wreckage of that airship crash.”
“I didn’t know you had the glider.” Out of everything to focus on, she picked the fact that the Alchemists had taken one of the gliders? “Where did they go?”
Florence folded her fingers together, gripping them tightly. They’d left her behind. It was all for what she said. Maybe she’d been right, maybe she’d been justified, maybe she still was, but none of that expunged the pain at the thought of being left alone.